Eavesdropping to Go On, Cheney Tells Midshipmen

Eavesdropping to Go On, Cheney Tells Midshipmen
Naval Academy Revels Over Graduation, Reflects on War

Vice President Cheney highlighted America's intelligence efforts yesterday as critical tools in the fight against terrorists at home and abroad and vowed the administration would continue a controversial eavesdropping program that he said has been wrongly dubbed "domestic surveillance."

"I want each one of you to know that the president will not relent in the effort to track the enemies of the United States with every legitimate tool in his command," Cheney said during a graduation address at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. "This is not a war we can win on the defensive. Our only option against these enemies is to monitor them, to find them, to fight them and to destroy them."

Cheney said Bush authorized the National Security Agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to intercept a certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. "If people in the United States are communicating with al-Qaeda, they are talking to the enemy -- and we need to know about it," he said.

The highly classified program was "improperly revealed to the news media, some of which now describe it as domestic surveillance," Cheney said. "That is not the case. We are talking about international communications, one end of which we have reason to believe is related to al-Qaeda or to terrorist networks. It's hard to think of any category of information that could be more important to the safety of the United States."

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